The Press - The press and global america since 1941: an overview

The year 1941—when the United States went to war against Germany,
Japan, and the other Axis powers in World War II—marked a watershed
in America's participation in world affairs. Before then, the U.S.
government's involvement outside the northern half of the Western
Hemisphere had been limited and episodic. Since then, America has been so
internationalist that it has had interests and troop deployments on every
continent and ocean. Among many other things, America's perceived
interests have included military security, international institutions,
opposition to communism, trade and investment, foreign aid, health issues,
and freedom of information. The press as a whole has supported this, the
most expansive definition of national interests in human history. At the
same time, the press has been the major locus of an often heated debate
about precisely how America's internationalism should be defined
and applied in many of the thousands of specific issues that have faced
policymakers during the years since 1941.

In retrospect, the history of the relationship between the press and U.S.
foreign policy since 1941 divides at the time of the large-scale U.S.
involvement in Vietnam (1965–1973). If one were forced to pick one
event that formed the watershed between the two eras in the
press-government relations on foreign policy, it might well be the heavily
publicized hearings on the Vietnam War held by Senator J. William
Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the winter of
1966. These hearings exposed the sharp differences of opinion between
witnesses like Secretary of State Dean Rusk who strongly supported the
U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the continued validity of a firm stance
against communism, and witnesses like former State Department official
George Kennan who argued that the containment policy should not be applied
in Southeast Asia and that major changes were underway in communist
nations that made earlier anticommunist approaches obsolete.

As part of a continuum of developments beginning with the well-publicized
improvement in U.S.–Soviet relations during 1963, the hearings
helped to make it intellectually respectable for some newspapers and
magazines (for example, the
New York Times
and
Newsweek
) to abandon their strong traditional support for containment, whereas
others (the
Wall Street Journal
and
National Review
) largely continued their Cold War approach. Thus the hearings—and,
much more, the Vietnam War that prompted them and continued long after the
hearings ended—divided press coverage of U.S. foreign policy from a
pattern of largely supportive coverage of major administration
policies—from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 roughly
through 1965—to a new pattern from 1966 forward in which coverage
was much more divided and typically was contested—at least until
the end of the Cold War—along liberal/conservative ideological
lines.

The Vietnam War coincided with a marked shift in news coverage away from
the ideal of "objectivity" toward the acceptance of more
analysis and interpretation in news stories in newspapers (news magazines
like
Time
and
Newsweek
had never hesitated to mix news and interpretation). In part this shift
by newspapers was a response to the fact that, by the 1960s, television
had become the major source of breaking news for growing numbers of
Americans. Thus print journalists moved toward a new focus: interpretation
in greater depth than network television news could accomplish.

The shift toward larger numbers of interpretive stories also resulted from
(1) a growing recognition that the norm of objectivity, however desirable
in theory, was an unattainable ideal; and (2) the belief that this ideal
had given government officials (including the notorious Senator Joseph
McCarthy) too much power to get their often questionable views into print
in such a way that they appeared to be facts. In practice, interpretation
meant that most newspapers carried more stories that raised questions
about particular foreign policies, notably on the front pages that
previously had been reserved for "news."

Although it is accurate to emphasize the greater diversity and more
critical tone of press coverage of U.S. foreign policy after the
mid-1960s, one should not draw too sharp a contrast between pre-Vietnam
and post-Vietnam coverage. It is true that most journalists (and most
newspapers and magazines) supported the major goals of U.S. policy from
Pearl Harbor through the early 1960s: defeating Germany and Japan, helping
to establish a peace favorable to American interests and ideals, and then
providing leadership in containing communist and other challenges to
America's preferred postwar world order. It is also true that the
press generally accepted government censorship of news relating to
military activities during World War II and the Korean War.

Yet anyone who reads large numbers of newspapers and periodicals on
foreign affairs between the early 1940s and the early 1960s will find a
tremendous diversity of views. That was true on many subjects during World
War II, and it was even more evident thereafter. During the late 1940s,
for example, the leading syndicated columnists—Walter Lippmann and
Joseph Alsop—disagreed sharply about the approach America should
take in containing the Soviet Union. And the nation's leading
magazine publisher, Henry Luce of Time Incorporated, vehemently disagreed
with the government and with the editors of the nation's leading
newspaper, the
New York Times,
about U.S. policy toward China. Despite their differences of opinion,
leading journalists like Lippmann, Alsop, and Luce were befriended and
courted by presidents and other high officials after World War II to an
extent that was unprecedented in American history.

Diversity of coverage was found in both of the studies of the press and
foreign policy during this era in which the authors of this essay were
involved. Both studies used content analysis of coverage during several
periods. In
The Press and the Origins of the Cold War, 1944–1947,
Louis W. Liebovich did content analysis of coverage between 1944 and 1947
in
Time
magazine, the
New York Herald Tribune,
the
Chicago Tribune,
and the
San Francisco Chronicle.
He repeatedly found varied coverage in the four publications, with
coverage in the highly idiosyncratic
Chicago Tribune
(the newspaper with the largest circulation in the Midwest) diverging the
most sharply. In a time of considerable uncertainty in relations between
America and Russia in which President Harry S. Truman did not spell out
his own views on U.S.–Soviet relations for more than eighteen
months after the end of World War II, Liebovich concluded that
"[o]nly the
Chicago Tribune
could claim steady opposition to any Soviet-U.S. accord."

In a book on the press and four foreign policy crises during the Kennedy
years, Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering found
substantial differences in coverage in all five newspapers
studied—the
New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis
Post-Dispatch,
and
San Francisco Examiner.
Not surprisingly, given its location in Washington, the
Post
gave the most weight to administration sources, the
Times
had the most foreign sources, the
Post-Dispatch
offered the most criticisms from a liberal perspective, the
Tribune
's news stories and editorials frequently were imbued with the
paper's unique blend of isolationism and militant anticommunism,
and the
Examiner
emphasized a Republican internationalism that viewed President Kennedy as
too weak in dealing with communist nations.

In light of the relative liberalism and internationalism of northeastern
elites and government employees, the fairly liberal, internationalist
views of the
Post
and
Times
are easily understood. But could even most residents of Chicago and St.
Louis explain why the leading papers in their cities were, respectively,
militantly isolationist and liberally internationalist? And who would
expect a conservative Republican paper to be one of the two leading
newspapers (along with the
San Francisco Chronicle
) in traditionally liberal San Francisco? Diversity indeed.

A broad range of opinion on foreign policy between Pearl Harbor and the
mid-1960s was even more pronounced in magazines. During World War II, for
example, several prominent conservative magazines published articles
warning that it would be impossible for America to continue to cooperate
after the war with the dictatorial, expansionist Russian government.
During the mid-1950s, writers for the liberal
Nation
and
New Republic
argued that America should pursue policies designed to end the Cold War;
meanwhile, contributors to the conservative
National Review
were insisting that World War III already was underway and that the
communist side was winning. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, some
conservative journals prematurely denounced Fidel Castro's
"communist" revolution in Cuba, whereas some liberal
magazines featured articles praising Castro even after he acknowledged his
allegiance to communism.

Despite this diversity of coverage even at the height of the Cold War,
there were significant differences beginning about 1966. The changes
resulted primarily from the Vietnam War and the breakdown of the Cold War
consensus among the "responsible" mainstream journalists who
worked for leading newspapers and magazines. Because the
New York Times
was the most respected newspaper among officials and journalists in
Washington, and because its news and editorial judgments influenced
coverage at the major magazines and television networks located in New
York, the shift at the
Times
away from the Cold War consensus was especially significant.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the
Times
effectively had supported Central Intelligence Agency interventions
designed to overthrow existing governments, either by accepting official
denials of U.S. involvement (for example, Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in
1954) or by playing down coverage of planned interventions (such as Cuba
in 1961). The
Times
also helped the government maintain numerous official secrets, including
the fact that some U.S. journalists stationed abroad were part-time CIA
employees who assisted the government in waging the Cold War. In contrast,
when the
Times
learned from disgruntled officials that the Nixon administration had
secretly been bombing North Vietnamese forces inside Cambodia, it printed
the information and thus demonstrated the falsity of the
administration's public statements on the subject.

In subsequent years the
Times
repeatedly exposed and denounced the CIA's (that is,
Nixon's) efforts to oust Chile's Marxist president and the
CIA's (Reagan's) efforts to defeat Nicaragua's
Marxist leaders. The
Washington Post,
which had given at least as fervent support as the
Times
to most anticommunist policies, also challenged the government's
continuing Cold War approach by the late 1960s and early 1970s. The
publication of large sections of the Pentagon Papers (a classified
official study of the evolution of U.S. policy in Vietnam) by the
Times, Post,
and
Boston Globe
in June 1971 was a clear sign from leading news organizations that the
era of unquestioning cooperation with officials on national security
issues was over.

In addition to growing differences of opinion over U.S. foreign policy,
the 1960s ethos of questioning authority—an ethos reinforced by
Nixon's dishonesty during the Watergate affair that cost him his
presidency—also affected relations between reporters and officials
for many years thereafter. During and after Watergate, Energy Secretary
James Schlesinger recalled, "the press took great delight in
demonstrating that the government was wrong." In comparing Dean
Rusk's relations with reporters in the early 1960s with the
experience of another Democratic secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, in the
late 1970s, Martin Linsky found "no sense from Vance of personal
intimacy with reporters, and no sense that from his perspective they were
waiting for his wisdom." Vance told Linsky that he saw the press as
"playing a critically important role. The press can either make or
break a policy initiative."

Many high officials in the Reagan administration believed that the
government, by giving the news media a relatively free hand in covering
the conflict in Vietnam, had contributed to America's failure
there. Accordingly, when Reagan in October 1983 ordered U.S. troops to
invade the small Caribbean nation of Grenada and overthrow its pro-Cuban
government, the administration did not permit any reporters to accompany
the troops. Two immediate results were the press's dependence on
administration sources for information about the invasion and criticism of
official news management in many news stories and editorials. The invasion
revealed that conservative concerns about a monolithic "eastern
liberal press" were overblown: after U.S. troops had defeated Cuban
forces and installed a noncommunist government, editorials in the liberal
New York Times
criticized the invasion, but the moderate
Washington Post
concluded that "President Reagan made the right decision in
Grenada."

Press coverage of the Grenada invasion and its consequences largely
occurred within a couple weeks in late October and early November 1983. A
relatively big story that spanned the entire decade—U.S. policy
toward the civil wars in Central America—illustrated the sharp
divisions within Congress and American society that found their way into
press coverage of many foreign policy issues after the mid-1960s. To the
Reagan administration and its conservative supporters, the Marxist left,
aided by the Soviet Union and Cuba, had gained power in Nicaragua in the
late 1970s and was threatening to establish pro-Soviet communist regimes
in El Salvador and Guatemala as well. Deeply concerned that communist
ideology and Soviet power were expanding in "America's
backyard," conservatives believed that the Marxist left needed to
be defeated decisively. Liberals, who viewed the existing governments in
El Salvador and Guatemala as highly repressive and feared "another
Vietnam," thought that America should send neither military aid nor
troops to assist anticommunist governments in those two nations or rebel
"contra" forces in Nicaragua. Because of the sharp
ideological divisions on this issue and most Americans' lack of
knowledge about the region, U.S. policy toward Central America in the
1980s was a subject on which many reporters, editorial writers, and
columnists had almost as much difficulty in obtaining accurate information
and presenting balanced perspectives as did administration officials,
members of Congress, academics, religious leaders, and political
activists.

With the ending by early 1990 of both the Cold War and the
U.S.–Soviet–Cuban contest in Central America, journalists
and officials turned their attention to new issues that thankfully could
no longer be placed in Cold War frames. America still had alliances and a
strong general interest in peace and stability, but vital interests in
specific situations were harder to define in the absence of an
international communist movement. When foreign policy issues involving
possible military interventions arose in the 1990s, therefore, the debate
in Washington and in the press focused on whether the nation had
sufficient national interests to send troops to nations like Kuwait,
Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.

Even within the affluent news organizations, the issue of priorities
became more difficult to resolve in the absence of a communist threat.
"We have chosen to invest major resources in covering the former
Yugoslavia, but is this the correct move?" Bernard Gwertzman of the
Times
wrote. "Should we care what happens to Serbs, Croats, and
Bosnians?" Except in a few papers like the
Times
with a strong tradition of international reporting, the volume of foreign
news coverage dropped sharply in both newspapers and news magazines in the
1990s.

There were positive trends as well. Reporting and commenting on the
lengthy deliberations over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
treaty in the early 1990s and over most-favored-nation trading status for
China several years later, the press played important roles in the largest
public discussions of America's international economic policies
since the debates over tariff policy in the 1920s and early 1930s. Because
the print media are indispensable for detailed analysis, and television
excels in presenting vivid images, newspapers and magazines may well have
had relatively greater influence than television in the debates over
economic policy than in the discussions of possible military
interventions.

The press also has played an important role in bringing environmental
issues—including proposed international actions to deal with
them—to public attention. An example is the debate over the 1997
Kyoto Protocol to address global warming. An analysis by Brigitte Nacos,
Robert Shapiro, and Pierangelo Isernia of press coverage in two national
newspapers during a six-month period from September 1997 through February
1998 found that the
New York Times
published sixty-five articles on the subject and the
Wall Street Journal
published twenty-three. The authors also found that

contrary to the American media's more common coverage of foreign
policy issues, government officials did not dominate that press
coverage. Taken together, policy and scientific experts, a variety of
organized interests (business, labor unions, environmentalists), as well
as the public, were more frequently covered than officials at
Washington's major news beats…. As a result, the
media—especially newspapers—reflected the kind of robust
debate that is especially essential in the American system of
government, where decision makers pay considerable attention to public
opinion.

This and other studies suggest that, with the Cold War over, the press is
less likely to rely as heavily on administration and congressional sources
for its news stories as it did earlier. To be sure, the views of
governmental leaders in a democracy need to be publicized and evaluated,
so that voters can have information on which to base judgments in future
elections. But the views of others—including the representatives of
the groups listed in the above quotation—also need to be included
so that voters have a broad base of information and perspectives upon
which to form their opinions. By giving detailed coverage to relatively
neglected issues like international economics and the environment, and by
providing greater balance between governmental and nongovernmental sources
for news stories about these issues, the press may well be doing a better
job in covering foreign policy issues today than it did during the Cold
War.